The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines. In this contribution, we investigate the impact of this program using a real-time online-survey data with a total of more than 20,000 observations. We employ propensity score matching, making use of a rich set of variables that influence selection into the treatment and the outcome variable, the subjective survival probability. We observe that the emergency aid program had significant effects, with the subjective survival probability of self-employment being moderately increased. We further reveal important effect heterogeneities with respect to education, risk tolerance, and industries. We also observe positive effects only among those whose application was processed within a few days. Lastly, the positive effect on the survival probability is fading out already two weeks after the emergency aid was granted. Our findings have important policy implications for the design of such support programs in the course of this crisis.

No abstract

Against the background of remunicipalisation trends in European public service sectors, this paper estimates firm‐level productivity for German electricity retailers and tests whether the ownership type has a significant impact on productivity. We specify a production function for the retail sector with labour and external services as main inputs, which is estimated using a control function approach. Employing a newly constructed dataset on German utilities by the German Federal Statistical Office for the years 2003‐12, we find that firm‐level productivity generally increased until 2008 but not afterwards. We do not find any evidence for ownership having an impact on productivity.

No abstract

In advanced economies, state-owned enterprises play an important role in sectors of general interest such as energy and water supply. The conditions under which they operate have changed fundamentally since 1998, with new strategies required for firms to preserve market shares in the face of liberalisation and technological innovation. This paper investigates the productivity effect of three strategies in new public management: corporatisation, outsourcing, and partial privatisation. Firm-level productivity is estimated from production data using a control function approach. As most of the firms are typically multiproduct firms, we suggest a method for modelling differences in the product mix and to account for heterogeneous production environments. Using a newly constructed and unique dataset from the German Federal Statistical Office, we find that outsourcing and corporatisation positively impact productivity, while partial privatisation does not increase productivity.